While I agree that shifting the world away from being so US-centric is a good idea long-term, this is absolutely not the way to do it. This is going to cause an absolute shitload of harm everywhere - and not just to Western countries, lest you think I’m trying to be an apologist for them. The only parties that this will unequivocally benefit are Russia and NK. Even China is gonna feel some splash damage from the (now ongoing) collapse of US geopolitical and geoeconomic stability.

Ah - I misinterpreted the object of your comment, my bad

That’s about as nuclear of an option as they can threaten in terms of geoeconomics and how they’ll directly impact the US, tbh.

For those in the back: they’re threatening to jump on the bandwagon that’s shifting away from the petrodollar, which would have absolutely catastrophic consequences for the US economy, as well as in general. Think “fall of the USSR” type shit. This is not an exaggeration.

And yeah, it can absolutely be argued that the petrodollar was a stupid fucking idea for a lot of reasons. But it did let the US more or less not care about debt at all for over a half century. Pulling that rug is going to have a lot of consequences in a lot of places all over the world - not just the US - and will ultimately yield a lot of chaos.

Uh… genuine question: why did you convert? And what were you converting from?

Yeah so this isn’t gonna fly in any way, shape, or form. All of that will be cited by companies who are users as trade secrets and proprietary internal documentation. This is a great way for them to force their userbase away from their products.

So, yeah… bold move, cotton. Let’s see how it plays out.

1000 years from now the paint will be gone and it will be more interesting to geologists than archaeologists - assuming there are any -ologists (or humans) left at that point.

Fuck you, Gizmodo, and fuck off. There are consequences when you break the societal contract. This is that.

RTGs are subject to the issue of half-life - this is a consequence of that type of power source. Though, let’s be honest: we do not have any other sort of power generation technology that would be viable for literal decades on an interstellar space probe. And we definitely didn’t have a better alternative when they were launched.

Our judiciary doesn’t seem to understand how much of a tragicomedic fucking joke they’re making their branch of government out to be

Beltalowda kopeng mi 🤩

There’s a lot of copper in that sign, just so you know

Tell us you don’t understand modern geopolitics without telling us you don’t understand modern geopolitics

So, one of the really interesting things to me about this approach is that it offers the same asymmetric value proposition that cheap attack drones do to modern pre-drone IADS.

That is: this is a platform that costs 10-15k, and an AGM-88 of modern manufacture costs almost 900k, and a Kh-31 costs about 550k - and, just as importantly, both require a long time to manufacture. So, you could theoretically make a moderately large distributed array sprinkled over a few square kilometers, and even if they’re ALL turned on, it quickly becomes logistically infeasible to knock them all out without spending a silly quantity on antirad munitions, as well as massively attriting your stocks of antirad munitions. And if you turn like 10-25% of them on at a time and cycle through your array, the problem becomes even harder for the attacker. And if you have some sort of process or mechanism - like, oh I don’t know, figuring out how to do light aerial transport with cargo drones, or even figuring out how to mount these distributed array nodes on the drones themselves, and some sort of lightweight tether for providing power - the problem becomes a MASSIVE pain in the ass for an adversary (especially that last idea, which introduces z-axis and immediate maneuverability, such that the array could feasibly detect and altogether avoid an incoming antirad munition).

And that’s the paradigm of modern warfare - not just drones, but also networked and attritable systems that maintain functionality when elements are taken offline

As in: you agree with the article’s assertion?

lol shut the fuck up NYT

But also, this feels like it’s pure theater

Who the fuck emigrates to Europe as a hardcore American fascist? Seriously? What the actual fuck?